Social Capital and Union Revitalization: A Study of Worker Networks in the UK Audio‐Visual Industries

This article examines Jarley's contention that trade union revitalization is conditional upon the generation of social capital through the systematic creation of networks. It draws on a qualitative study of freelance workers in the UK audio‐visual industry to consider two propositions. The first, that ‘social capital within networks is forged on “bonds” that are conducive to trade union identity’ was not sustained by the data, which instead suggested that social capital is more likely to be generated by networks outside trade union structures. However, the data did support the second proposition that ‘trade unions can harness social capital in order to achieve concrete industrial relations outcomes’ by linking networks to reservoirs of expertise and influence.     

Identifying use and non-use values of animal welfare: Evidence from Swedish dairy agriculture

In this study, we sought to identify the use and non-use values that underlie farmers’ decision making with respect to animal welfare, based on in-depth interviews with 50 dairy farmers in Sweden. We identified use values related to: being able to continue the business, earning a living from the business, not being tied to the farm (i.e. having time available for other things), product quality, and work environment. We also identified non-use values related to avoidance of suffering, being able to further improve the welfare of dairy cows, the dairy farmer feeling good him/herself, ethical considerations, a feeling of doing the right thing, and animals eating properly (i.e. functioning as dairy cows should). Understanding the values underlying dairy farmers’ decision making with respect to animal welfare is an important step in understanding why these farmers work with animal welfare. The results are useful in improving communications from authorities and farm advisors to farmers, as a strategy to gain better acceptance for improved animal welfare standards; in designing product certification schemes in the food industry; and in communicating to the public the values influencing production of dairy products.     

Micro-processes of public good social innovation in the Australian social impact investment market

Social impact bonds (SIBs) are strategic alliances aiming to generate financial profit through social innovation in the delivery of public social services. SIBs are also a product on the social impact investment market. There is little evidence for SIBs' effectiveness, and their ongoing international popularity partly rests on a theoretical premise that market mechanisms can effectively generate and diffuse social innovation. However, the literature contains no empirical consideration of whether and how this premise applies to public good social innovations. Our empirical study fills this gap by finding that public good social innovations are stimulated by market mechanisms, and markets are in turn shaped by these innovations. Despite this, public good social innovations eventually break away from markets in a micro-process we term ‘schisming’. Through describing how and why schisming occurs, we make a unique contribution to existing knowledge of the micro-processes of concerned market shaping, and the extent to which economic markets and a concerned society are embedded within each other. Implications for practitioners seeking to bridge social innovation and economic markets include the need to be cognisant of how contextual, socially constructed concerns affect the potential and process of diffusing social innovations.     

Customer‐led and market‐oriented: a matter of balance

This article is prompted by Slater and Narver’s (1998) SMJ article entitled ‘Customer‐led and market‐oriented: Let’s not confuse the two’. It is suggested here that Slater and Narver’s contention that strategic success is a function of market‐led orientation rather than customer‐led orientation is too reductionist a proposition which gives inadequate weight to the resource endowment and scale differences between companies. The argument is offered that success through time for the bulk of businesses will be directly related to close relationships with existing customers, particularly for smaller companies, which are the vast majority. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

INFORMATIVE ADVERTISING: COMPETITION OR COOPERATION?*

In a duopoly version of the Grossman and Shapiro [1984] model of informative advertising, I examine firms' incentives to semicollude on advertising and the welfare implications thereof. I find that, relative to the noncooperative outcome, semicollusion on advertising is more profitable but is detrimental to welfare. I also find that when the advertising cost is ‘low,’ advertising semicollusion is more harmful to welfare than price semicollusion. These findings are important for competition policy since traditionally, cooperative advertising is not treated in the same light as price collusion.     

THE FAILING FIRM DEFENSE*

This paper evaluates the welfare consequences of the failing firm defense (FFD) in the EU and U.S. merger laws. To this end, I combine an oligopoly model with an ‘endogenous valuations’ auction model. The FFD is shown to work reasonably well for consumers unless small firms are too small. The FFD may, however, lead to total surplus losses, due to a ‘least danger to competition’ (LDC) condition which favors small, and thus possibly inefficient, firms. It is also shown that, in a multi‐firm setting, the FFD increases the incentive for predation only when the assets are industry‐specific.     

A ‘Problem of Fairness’ in the Making: The Transformation of Public Services from the Perspective of Postal Workers

During the last two decades public administration and public services have undergone profound changes with far‐reaching impacts on employment relations and working conditions. The paper presents the perceptions and lived experiences of workers affected by liberalization and privatization of public services. In doing so it focuses on workers’ ideas of fairness and dignity at work using the concepts of distribution, recognition and the public ethos of the common good and linking them to fundamental principles of justice. It is argued that the perception of inequalities as fair, while it is shaped by custom, is also being socially constructed during far‐reaching changes. The analysis is based on a series of qualitative interviews conducted in Austria, Germany and Switzerland with postal‐service workers, a sector well suited for the analysis because of the far‐reaching changes in terms of market regulation, ownership of organizations, labour regulation, employment and working conditions.     

Enacting the internet and social media on the public sector's frontline

Recognising their growing role in public services, this article draws on the notion of ‘enactment’ to argue that the internet and social media (I&SM) need to be understood in particular institutional, organisational and social contexts. Focusing on street‐level bureaucrats who deliver frontline services, we explore efforts to integrate I&SM into youth work with clients who are thought to be ‘digitally savvy’ but also in need of protection from the ‘online world’. As clients can be vulnerable and trust is a key relational component, organisation–practitioner–client boundaries are complex and under continuous renegotiation. However, the layering of new virtual channels of interaction adds extra complexity. This change necessitates the development of innovative routines, practices and protocols, but these are being developed in a wider social context where the norms of using social media have not caught up with practice and the use of these tools is still often surrounded by moral panic.     

Industrial Relations, Social Pacts and Welfare Expenditures: A Cross-national Comparison

Industrial relations and welfare state are interrelated. On the basis of time‐series data for 20 OECD countries, this paper discusses and tests the impact of industrial relations on social expenditures, including ‘social pacts’ as a means of combining wage moderation and welfare state reforms. The findings suggest that industrial relations have an impact mainly through the differential effects of distinct bargaining systems: a minor impact results from their externalities. The major impact ensues from their differing degrees of politicization, leading to higher expenditures in the case of peak‐level arrangements, as compared to more decentralized systems. Hence, the widely assumed potential of social pacts for welfare state reforms has been exaggerated.     

Environment-strategy coalignment: An empirical test of its performance implications

The positive performance impact of a coalignment between the environment and strategy of a business is an important theoretical proposition in strategic management. In spite of its importance and intuitive appeal, the extent of empirical support is equivocal and riddled with problems of conceptualizing and testing for coalignment. This paper evaluates alternate approaches to testing such a proposition and argues in favor of specifying coalignment as ‘profile deviation’, which states that coalignment is the degree to which strategic resource deployments adhere to an ‘ideal profile’ for a given environment. Subsequently, this proposition is tested across two time periods, and eight distinct environments in two different samples drawn from the PIMS data base. Results, which were generally robust across the two periods, strongly support the proposition of a positive performance impact of environment-strategy coalignment. Implications and research directions are developed.     

Social Movement Theory,Collective Action Frames and Union Theory: A Critique and Extension

The publication of John Kelly's Rethinking Industrial Relations in 1998 spawned a growing interest among researchers in exploring how social movement (SM) theory can be used to inform union research, particularly in the context of revitalization/renewal debates. Our starting proposition is that this approach can be extended through an engagement with the larger corpus of SM theory. We focus in particular on the ‘collective action frame’ concept. Drawing on examples used by SM scholars, we illustrate how these concepts can be used to extend and enrich union theory and pose new questions concerning the role of unions.     

The information paradox in a monopolist’s credence goods market

Credence good markets, such as those for car repairs and medical treatments, are generally characterized by an ex-ante and ex-post information asymmetry between the uninformed customers and the informed expert. In this paper, we allow for both uninformed as well as informed customers to exist in a monopolist credence goods market. We analyze the implications of this kind of informational heterogeneity for the expert’s pricing decisions, incentives to commit fraud, as well as market efficiency and social welfare under different institutional arrangements. Most importantly, our approach enables us to evaluate endeavours to improve the level of customers’ information. Contrary to basic intuition, we find that recent developments and policy measures originally aimed at improving social welfare by increasing the level of information might actually backfire.     

Communication patterns in small R & D projects

An empirical investigation was carried out on the pattern and role of communication in two ongoing applied research projects in one of the national laboratories of the C. S. I. R., India. The overall objectives of the study were: (1) to investigate the communication pattern and its relationship with parameters like hierarchy, educational status and social relations: (2) to identify ‘technological gatekeepers’ and ‘isolates’ and study their characteristics and roles; (3) to study the role of informal communication vis-à-vis formal communication in problem-solving and idea-generation. In this paper, the first two aspects are discussed: the role of informal communication in problem-solving and idea-generation will be published in a subsequent paper.     

Patent Quality and a Two‐Tiered Patent System

In this paper, we study the determinants of patent quality and volume of patent applications when inventors care about perceived patent quality. We analyze the effects of various policy reforms, specifically, a proposal to establish a two‐tiered patent system. In the two‐tiered system, applicants can choose between a regular patent and a more costly, possibly more thoroughly examined, ‘gold‐plate’ patent. Introducing a second patent‐tier can reduce patent applications, reduce the incidence of bad patents, and sometimes increase social welfare. The gold‐plate tier attracts inventors with high ex‐ante probability of validity, but not necessarily applicants with innovations of high economic value.     

Business network becoming: Figurations of time,change and process

Concepts such as ‘time’ and ‘change’ are always presaged by metaphor, narratives and other ‘tropes’ and are therefore, representations invented by association, analogy, indirect inferences and figuration. If these representations change, then their meaning also changes. In this paper, we argue that dominant figurations of time have been predominantly mechanistic and a consequence of ‘substance’ metaphysics. The mechanistic metaphor of time constructs comprehensions of time that are linear, homogenous and clock-like. As with any analogical representations, this type of figuration favors some aspects of time and diminishes others. Our proposition is that if we apply an alternative ‘process metaphysics’ to time, then this is associated with different figurative representations. In this paper, we make specific reference to the IMP research tradition where we explore ‘holographic or rhizomic time’ as a different temporal metaphor. We illustrate what linear clock time reveals and hides in a ‘centered’ epistemology and explore what an adoption of ‘holographic’ time would allow us to see, and discuss some of the benefits and limitations of this different figuration of time, which promotes a ‘de-centered’ epistemology.     

A NICE agenda for IMP research

The IMP (Industrial Marketing and Purchasing) Group has engaged in a number of interesting developments in the past few years. Particularly adventurous have been the agendas of ‘pictures’ and sense-making and of time. In this paper we argue that borrowing and combining contemporary foci within social science on narratives, identity, culture and epoché temporality (for which we use the acronym N.I.C.E) allows the construction of an approach that can integrate these IMP agendas into a new research direction for the group that will keep it at the leading edge of marketing research. The purpose of our paper is to introduce and integrate discursive and temporal elements into the understanding and research of business networks to develop a more dynamic and hermeneutic approach. Our purpose is to provide a contribution to the field in exploring how identities are formed within business networks through narrative episodes in interconnecting relationships over time. We bring together all of the elements of a NICE agenda in an attempt to provide an integrative, ‘multi-lens’ theory of business networks focussed within the IMP research tradition. In doing so, we construct meaning as itself networked; sense-making involves relating presently narrated episodes to symbolic and material aspects of other narrative network episodes and events through emplotment and storying.     

Grain substitution and food dependency in the Third World : Evidence from cross-country data

Critics of the green revolution in agriculture have argued that the introduction of high-yielding varieties of seed and their requisite complementary inputs to the countries of the Third World have actually rendered these countries more food dependent than before. It is also argued that the internal results of this technology transfer have been increasing inequality in the distribution of income and growing malnutrition of the majority of the populations in these countries. The purpose of this paper is to examine empirically the relationships between so-called ‘grain substitution” and several indicators of human welfare including malnutrition and child mortality. The study is based on cross-country data covering over 70 nations in the Third World and a time period extending from the early to mid-1960s through 1989/1990. The results suggest a negative and statistically significant relationship between social welfare and the process of grain substitution. On the other hand, the data do not support the proposition that grain substitution is significantly related to levels of external food dependency.     

Catching Fire: Institutional Interdependencies in Union‐Facilitated Knowledge Diffusion

I find that school union representatives’ ‘boundary spanning’ communications throughout the school district predict the diffusion of knowledge between schools. Hence, my data reveal school union representatives as critical conduits for improvement‐related knowledge transfer and innovation. Yet, I also find that these external networks interact strongly with the level of workforce participation characterizing each school: The effects of external networks on internal knowledge diffusion are considerably stronger in more participative schools compared to less participative schools. This research contributes to industrial relations scholarship by demonstrating how union‐related institutions can foster unique social structures that directly strengthen innovation‐related capabilities, as well as how the efficacy of these networks depends on managerial norms at different areas of the organization. This study is also of timely practical relevance at a time when labour unions are increasingly painted as obstacles to, rather than potential facilitators of, improvement and innovation.     

When Public Utilities <Emphasis Type="Italic">Like</Emphasis> to Talk on Facebook

As the leading social media tool, Facebook is increasingly becoming an important channel for two-sided stakeholder communication in the energy sector. Even though public utilities more and more all relying on such virtual communication, little is known regarding the communication-related factors and their interdependencies. This study aims to reduce this research gap by analysing correlations between a public utility’s specifications, communication interactivity, the resources spent and the outcome of the Facebook conversation. In 2016, an online questionnaire was sent to German, Austrian and Swiss utility companies. The empirical data of the 139 utilities that responded fully support relationships between the communication interactivity and the invested resources as well as the outcomes of a communication. In this way, the results provide new insights for scholars and practitioners into the Facebook conversations of public entities.